The McLeod Bay Antelope, 1983

Down the bay we came, on the heels of ice-out. It was the first week of July, and we were dodging the last few mini-bergs and pollen-covered shards. Miles and acres of rotten ice had blocked our way for two days just north of Taltheilei Narrows, until a west wind finally piped up to blow it all to smithereens.

Our ship was a beamy plywood-lapstrake seventeen-foot Thompson runabout, with steam-bent white-oak ribs, mahogany trim, and beautiful bronze fittings. Without a doubt she’d been a stunner in her heyday, the early 1960’s, towing water skiers on Lake Vermillion. But she had fallen on hard times, and when on an April day my buddy Mitch and I spotted her careened on a front lawn in Tower, Minnesota, we stopped and knocked. “Boys, if you can get that boat out of here, you can have it.”  “We’ll be back in the morning,” we replied.

She was reincarnated as a no-nonsense miniature freighter. A couple of thick coats of blue and yellow paint, a refurbished Seliga canoe strapped upside-down on an overhead pole rack, kegs and jerry cans of gasoline, boxes of grub and tools, Duluth packs of camping gear, and – lest I forget – ten (count ‘em!) feisty bug-bitten summer-time-shedding huskies, tucked in and hunkered low on short picket chains — five to starboard, five to port. Our Evinrude forty-horse, a gas-hungry chugger about the size of a baby grand piano, was discovered at Joe Gilbert’s used-motor emporium on Chapman Street in Ely, and it was bolted to the transom. It pushed the whole show, not very stealthily, up the lake at a steady seven or eight knots. Which is the perfect speed, may I point out, for poking a motorboat into unfamiliar and uncharted waters.

No radio, no GPS, no batteries, no chargers, no wires, no satellite check-ins.

And I swear, just writing that previous sentence makes me sigh. Those were the days, people. You can still find your own version of them if you want to.

Well, come to think of it, there were two tiny 16-gauge wires running side by side together up from the motor to the steering station, where we had mounted a throttle and a shifter and the stout wheel from an early-70’s junkyard Pontiac. A toggle switch there gave us a way to kill Mr. Evinrude at the flick of a finger. That switch came in handy now and then, when a dog jumped overboard or we glimpsed bottom or suspicious-looking breakers dead ahead.

The McLeod Bay Antelope, we christened her, after Stan Rogers’ infamous Antelope in his ballad of Barrett’s Privateers: “With a list to port and her sails in rags, and the cook in the scuppers with the staggers and jags. God damn them all…”

It was quite a summer, that summer of 1983. Upon reaching Hoarfrost River, by then six days out from Yellowknife, we discovered another scruffy-looking young gent happily ensconced in the tilting log cabin there. That was a surprise for us, to say the least, since we had a note from Jimmy Colburn advising “Whomever it may concern” that we had his permission to base ourselves at the Hoarfrost for the season – and for even longer if things worked out. Mr. Wooledge assured us that he expected to finalize his own purchase of the place in just a few days. That part of the story (for of course he never did finalize the purchase, and two years later I did) was yet to be written.

We were a little crestfallen, but we took him at his word and chugged on down the bay another seven miles to a cluster of small islands, where we moored our trusty Antelope, launched the Seliga, set the dogs loose on an island across from ours, and made ourselves a base camp for two months. There were solo trips up to Artillery Lake and back with the canoe, five-day walks with a dog or two in the hills around the bay, days of smoke from distant fires, days of visiting with the weathermen down at the Reliance station, days of fishing, days of restlessness, days of fishing, days of reading, days of fishing, days of rain, days of bliss, and days of fishing.

Come mid-September we had given up on the entire Hoarfrost River scheme. We loaded dogs, gear, and what little remained of our grub, and turned the McLeod Bay Antelope west for Yellowknife, 220 miles away. We almost made it there under our own steam, but that is another story. In a nutshell, we found a few days of paid work for some stakers in the Thor Lake area, and ended our voyage with the dogs sprawled on the foredeck of the freighter Hearne Channel  and the Antelope on a tow-rope behind. Dear Mr. Evinrude was only hitting on one cylinder by then, and we were very happy for the lift as the snow began to fly.

Forty years? Can it have been 40 years now? Yep.

And what, you may ask, was the point of this flurry of nostalgia this morning, as I sit on a train chugging along the south shore of Lake Erie, toward a nephew’s wedding in Vermont?

No point really, except perhaps to re-iterate a favorite couplet from W.H. Murray, attributed (apparently wrongly) to Goethe:

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.  /  Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

And then to segue to Stan Rogers.